To the latter point, yes, I am familiar with this phenomenon. But also with its inverse, where Germans have just as much trouble with American words as Americans have with German ones.
To the former point also, yes, I'm well aware of it. Please note: we are conversing in English here. We are all English speakers on this forum. When we speak to one another, what matters is that we communicate. We do not need to pronounce words as if we were speaking another language.
For example, Americans of a certain political bent pronounce "Iraq" something like "E Rock." Americans of another political leaning are more likely to say "eye rack." We understand either one. We would probably not understand the same word as spoken by an Iraqi (in whose language it sounds entirely different: different consonants and different vowels).
To say that we don't pronounce it the way Iraqis do is not to say we pronounce it wrong. We are speaking English, not Arabic.
In our language we luckily have official Dutch versions of many place names, mostly because we once owned them or traded there. So "Paris" is "Parijs", "Lille" is "Rijssel" and "New York", of course, is "Nieuw Amsterdam".
